An investigation of the relationship between job characteristics and the gender wage gap

This paper re-examines gender wage differences, taking into account notonly worker characteristics but also job characteristics. Considerationof a wide set of job quality indicators can explain a fraction of thewage gap that would otherwise be attributed to pure wage discrimination.In any case, the fraction of the wage gap that remains associated todifferential rewards for identical factors across sexes is stillsubstantial. Our results suggest that in order to avoid overestimationof the fraction of the wage gap attributable to discrimination, it isnecessary to control for job characteristics.

Labour segregation and immigrant and native-born wage distributions in Spain: an analysis using matched employer-employee data

This article carries out an empirical examination of the origin of the differences between immigrant and native-born wage structures in the Spanish labour market. Especial attention is given in the analysis to the role played by occupational and workplace segregation of immigrants. Legal immigrants from developing countries exhibit lower mean wages and a more compressed wage structure than native-born workers. By contrast, immigrants from developed countries display higher mean wages and a more dispersed wage structure. The main empirical finding is that the disparities in the wage distributions for the native-born and both groups of immigrants are largely explained by their different observed characteristics, with a particularly important influence in this context of workplace and, particularly, occupational segregation.

Unemployment and wage formation in a growth model with public capital

We study the relation between public capital, employment and growth under different assumptions concerning wage formation. We show that public capital increases economic growth, and that, if there is wage inertia, employment positively depends on both economic growth and public capital.

The spatial inequality of wage income in Barcelona Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT The measure and estimation of income levels in Barcelona Metropolitan Area (BMA) goes back a long way. Using different approaches and focusing on different municipalities, there is a lot of work in the field. The majority of the literature has focused on the estimation of income levels using variables related to consumption. The empirical evidence on wage differentials has shown an important growth during 80’s and 90’s especially in United Kingdom and USA. Less is known on spatial distribution of inequality. This paper presents a new data set for analyzing spatial distribution of wage income. This data is obtained by matching Wage Structure Survey (WSS) with data from Census disaggregated by census tracts. In this way we have a unique data set with wage incomes for every census track for 36 municipalities belonging to BMA. We develop a descriptive analysis of spatial distribution, testing for spatial autocorrelation and use the family of Generalised Entropy Indices to measure inequality. Properties of the index allow us to decompose inequality into inter and intra-municipality measures. Since we have two cross-sectional data for WSS (1995-2002) we can also analyze the evolution of the inequality in this period of economic growth. Key words: spatial distribution of wages, spatial autocorrelation, inequality indices.

Selection bias and unobservable heterogeneity applied at the wage equation of European married women

This paper utilizes a panel data sample selection model to correct the selection in the analysis of longitudinal labor market data for married women in European countries. We estimate the female wage equation in a framework of unbalanced panel data models with sample selection. The wage equations of females have several potential sources of.

Risk Attitude And Wage Growth: Replication And Reconstruction

We replicate Shaw (1996) who found that individual wage growth is higher for individuals with greater preference for risk taking. Expanding her dataset with more American observations and data for Germany, Spain and Italy, we find mixed support for the earlier results. We present and estimate a new model and find that in particular the wage level is sensitive to attitudes towards risk taking. Comments given at the Labour Economics Conference in honour of Niels Westergaard (Nyborg, August 2008) and EALE 2008 (Amsterdam) and at seminars in Maastricht,Reus and Essen (RWI) are gratefully acknowledged. The authors also acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant number SEJ2007-66318) and from the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA. JEL code: J24; J30. Key words: wage growth, risk, post-school investment.

The Wage-Productivity gap revisited: is the labour share neutral to employment?

This paper challenges the prevailing view of the neutrality of the labour income share to labour demand, and investigates its impact on the evolution of employment. Whilst maintaining the assumption of a unitary long-run elasticity of wages with respect to productivity, we demonstrate that productivity growth affects the labour share in the long run due to frictional growth (that is, the interplay of wage dynamics and productivity growth). In the light of this result, we consider a stylised labour demand equation and show that the labour share is a driving force of employment. We substantiate our analytical exposition by providing empirical models of wage setting and employment equations for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the US over the 1960-2008 period. Our findings show that the timevarying labour share of these countries has significantly influenced their employment trajectories across decades. This indicates that the evolution of the labour income share (or, equivalently, the wage-productivity gap) deserves the attention of policy makers.

Monopolistic competition and different wage setting systems

In this paper we match the static disequilibrium unemployment model without frictions in the labor market and monopolistic competition with an infinite horizon model of growth. We compare the wages set at the firm, sector and national (centralized) levels, their unemployment rates and growth of the economic variables, for the Cobb-Douglas production function, in order to see under wich conditions the inverse U hypothesis between unemployment and centralization of wage bargain is confirmed. We also analyze, in the three wage setting systems, the effect of an increase in the monopoly power on employment and growth.

Growth, unemployment and wage inertia

We introduce wage setting via efficiency wages in the neoclassical one-sector growth model to study the growth effects of wage inertia. We compare the dynamic equilibrium of an economy with wage inertia with the equilibrium of an economy without wage inertia. We show that wage inertia affects the long run employment rate and that the transitional dynamics of the main economic variables will be different because wages are a state variable when wage inertia is introduced. In particular, we show non-monotonic transitions in the economy with wage inertia that do not arise in the economy with flexible wages. We also study the growth effects of permanent technological and fiscal policy shocks in these two economies. During the transition, the growth effects of technological shocks obtained when wages exhibit inertia may be the opposite from the ones obtained when wages are flexible. In the long run, these technological shocks may have long run effects if there is wage inertia. We also show that the growth effects of fiscal policies will be delayed when there is wage inertia.

Wage effects from changes in local human capital in Britain

This paper examines the impact of local human capital on individuals’ wages through external effects. Employing wage regressions, it is found that changes in individuals’ wages are positively associated with changes in the shares of high-paid occupation workers in the British travel-to-work-areas for the late 1990s. I examine this positive association for different occupational groups (defined by pay) in order to disentangle between production function and consumer demand driven theoretical explanations. The wage effect is found to be stronger and significant for the bottom-paid occupational quintile compared to the middle-paid ones, and using also sectoral controls the paper argues to provide evidence for the existence of consumer demand effects.

Changes in wage structure in Mexico going beyond the mean: An analysis of differences in distribution, 1987-2008

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the relationship between wage inequality, employment structure, and returns to education in urban areas of Mexico during the past two decades (1987-2008). Applying Melly’s (2005) quantile regression based decomposition, we find that changes in wage inequality have been driven mainly by variations in educational wage premia. Additionally, we find that changes in employment structure, including occupation and firm size, have played a vital role. This evidence seems to suggest that the changes in wage inequality in urban Mexico cannot be interpreted in terms of a skill-biased change, but rather they are the result of an increasing demand for skills during that period.

Discrimination in Bankruptcy Situations

In a bankruptcy situation, not all claimants are affected in the same way. In particular, some depositors may enter into a situation of personal bankruptcy if they lose part of their investments. Events of this kind may lead to a social catastrophe. We propose discrimination among the claimants as a possible solution. A fact considered in the American bankruptcy law (among others) that establishes some discrimination on the claimants, or the Santander Bank that in the Madoff’s case reimbursed only the deposits to its particular customers. Moreover, the necessity of discriminating has already been mentioned in different contexts by Young (1988), Bossert (1995), Thomson (2003) and Pulido et al. (2002, 2007), for instance. In this paper, we take a bankruptcy solution as the reference point. Given this initial allocation, we make transfers from richer to poorer with the purpose of distributing not only the personal incurred losses as evenly as possible but also the transfers in a progressive way. The agents are divided into two groups depending on their personal monetary value (wealth, net-income, GDP or any other characteristic). Then, we impose a set of Axioms that bound the maximal transfer that each net-contributor can make and each net-receiver can obtain. Finally, we define a value discriminant solution, and we characterize it by means of the Lorenz criterion. Endogenous convex combinations between solutions are also considered. Keywords: Bankruptcy, Discrimination, Compensation, Rules JEL classification: C71, D63, D71.

Is there a wage penalty for horizontal and vertical mismatch?

This paper studies how the horizontal and vertical mismatches in the labor market affect wage. We do so by taking into account that by choosing a job, wage and mismatches are simultaneously determined. The Seemingly Unrelated Equations model also allows us to control for any omitted variable that could cause biased estimators. We use REFLEX data for Spain. Results reveal that in most cases being horizontally matched has a wage premium and being over-educated does not affect wage. Results suggest that the modeling strategy successfully accounts for some omitted variable that affects simultaneously the probability of being horizontally matched and the wage. This could explain the existence of a wage penalty for over-educated workers when the omitted variable issue is not dealt with.